Let's Say We Did

Great pop music is often danceable, consistently upbeat and always catchy, but it’s very rare that pop music can be beautiful. Beauty in music most often comes in the form of an artistically conceived, obscurely genre-d and, more often than not, downbeat song – there aren’t many instances of beauty in songs you would consider to be toe-tapping singalongs. It seems wonderful to me then that I could open my inbox to find a track from a relatively unknown band looking for some exposure, download it and find that precise experience waiting for me. I never even had to ask.

The band hail from Stockholm and are called Let’s Say We Did; their song is ‘Galaxies’. The opening drumbeat and the slow introductions of acoustic guitar and bass bode for nothing more than a the kind of (admittedly pleasing) rock-infused pop that any upstart band could make and the lyrics about drinking and the radio don’t add to that supposed sense of beauty much, but as the song progresses it becomes something far more than the sum of its parts.

This isn’t music to scream your heart out to, but you can certainly sing along. This isn’t music to run to, but it makes a walk in the sun even more pleasant. This isn’t chart-bothering fare, but I can certainly see it being pop in the truest sense of the word – it’s inherently likable. I can’t really work it out – perhaps it’s the gentle creak of Sebastian Fors’ vocals, the way his lovelorn lyrics seem ultimately redemptive but inscrutable or even the slight echo on the chorus that reminds me of classic ’70s folk-rock, but something in this song makes it truly wonderful.

Maybe that’s why I like it so much. All my favourite music can’t be pinned down exactly. I can work my way around the sounds, the lyrics, the feelings, but there will always be that inexorable essence of a song or an album that puts it head and shoulders above other music like it. Whatever it is, Let’s Say We Did have created one of the most beautiful pop songs I’ve heard in a very long time, and I think that’s all that matters.